Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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for the ARL regard<strong>in</strong>g the development of services for digital repositories concluded that research
libraries would need to attend to the “demand side” or the specific needs of different discipl<strong>in</strong>ary user
groups, for “digital repositories are as much about users as they are about content, so the development
of high-value repository services requires understand<strong>in</strong>g user needs and capabilities” (ARL 2009b).
The report went even further, urg<strong>in</strong>g that “rather than develop<strong>in</strong>g technologies and hop<strong>in</strong>g they will be
usefully applied, libraries need more data, and discipl<strong>in</strong>e-specific data, on how a wide range of service
consumers—<strong>in</strong>stitutions, libraries, scholars, and researchers—value services and want to use
content.” 685 Thus, understand<strong>in</strong>g the specific needs, research methods, and <strong>in</strong>formation habits of the
different humanities discipl<strong>in</strong>es will be an essential part of design<strong>in</strong>g any larger humanities
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure.
This type of user-model<strong>in</strong>g work is currently be<strong>in</strong>g conducted by the DARIAH project, as expla<strong>in</strong>ed by
Benardou et al. (2010a). As part of the preparation stage of DARIAH, a “conceptual model for
scholarly research activity” is be<strong>in</strong>g created that is based on cultural-historical activity theory and is
be<strong>in</strong>g expressed us<strong>in</strong>g the CIDOC-CRM. A two-pronged research program is be<strong>in</strong>g conducted by the
Digital Curation Unit-IMIS of the Athena Research Centre that <strong>in</strong>cludes (1) an “empirical study of
scholarly work” that will be based on the transcription and conceptual encod<strong>in</strong>g of <strong>in</strong>terviews with
scholars (23 Europeans arts and humanities researchers) that can be considered “ma<strong>in</strong>stream” users of
digital resources, and (2) the creation of a “scholarly research activity model” that is based on an eventcentric
approach that will be used to formalize the results of the empirical study <strong>in</strong>to an actual systems
model. After review<strong>in</strong>g the extensive body of literature regard<strong>in</strong>g scholarly <strong>in</strong>formation behavior and
identify<strong>in</strong>g a number of common processes across them (e.g., citation cha<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g, brows<strong>in</strong>g, gather<strong>in</strong>g,
read<strong>in</strong>g, search<strong>in</strong>g, verify<strong>in</strong>g), Benardou et al. proposed that one issue <strong>in</strong> terms of their own work was
that all of these earlier studies present models that “view <strong>in</strong>formation behavior primarily as process;
consequently, the world of <strong>in</strong>formation objects, data and documents, rema<strong>in</strong>s <strong>in</strong> them as a rule
implicit” (Benardou et al. 2010a).
Benardou et al. identified a number of other limitations with the current literature regard<strong>in</strong>g scholarly
research activity, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g that it (1) focused predom<strong>in</strong>antly on the practice of “<strong>in</strong>formation seek<strong>in</strong>g”
rather than the whole “lifecycle of scholarly <strong>in</strong>formation use,” a po<strong>in</strong>t also made earlier by Toms and
O’Brien (2008); (2) concentrated primarily on the use of scholarly objects such as research
publications from a library perspective and only “implicitly” on the use of primary evidence and
secondary archives (a major research component of many humanities discipl<strong>in</strong>es”; (3) privileged the
<strong>in</strong>formation-seek<strong>in</strong>g process over “object model<strong>in</strong>g”; (4) del<strong>in</strong>eated a broad number of research
activities and processes (e.g., scholarly primitives) but never attempted to formally def<strong>in</strong>e these entities
or the relationships between them <strong>in</strong>to a model of the research process; and (5) typically never went
beyond “explanatory schematizations.” For these reasons, Benardou et al. stated that their work
objective would be to create a formal schematic of the research process, or basically to:
… establish a conceptually sound, pert<strong>in</strong>ent with regard to actual scholarly practice, and
elegant model of scholarly research activity, encompass<strong>in</strong>g both “object” (structure) and
“process/practice” (functional) perspectives, and amenable to operationalisation as a tool for: •
structur<strong>in</strong>g and analys<strong>in</strong>g the outcomes of evidence-based research on scholarly practice and
requirements and • produc<strong>in</strong>g clear and pert<strong>in</strong>ent <strong>in</strong>formation requirements, and specifications
685 Research <strong>in</strong>to data curation and digital repositories by Mart<strong>in</strong>ez-Uribe and Macdonald (2009), where the authors <strong>in</strong>terviewed life science researchers
regard<strong>in</strong>g their research practices and their likelihood of us<strong>in</strong>g a shared and open data repository, also stressed the importance of <strong>in</strong>vestigat<strong>in</strong>g actual user
requirements for a digital repository and emphasized that discipl<strong>in</strong>ary differences existed <strong>in</strong> terms of a desire for open data or digital archiv<strong>in</strong>g.